Triage vulnerabilities (alpha)

This topic tells you how to add vulnerability analysis associated with a workload in the Supply Chain Security Tools (SCST) - Store. This is an experimental feature, and the API is prone to changes in subsequent releases.

Important
The capability to triage scan results in SCST - Store is in the alpha stage, which means that it is still in early development and is subject to change at any point. You might encounter unexpected behavior from it.

Triage

Vulnerability analysis, or triage is the process of evaluating a reported vulnerability to decide on an effective remediation plan. Triage helps application teams generate useful insights about the vulnerabilities in their software so that they can make the right decisions about when and how to mitigate them. The current implementation of triage follows CycloneDX’s Vulnerability Exploitability eXchange (VEX) specification, and is designed specifically to work with Tanzu workloads.

Prerequisites

Before you begin vulnerability analysis, you must:

Install the Tanzu Insight plug-in. The Tanzu Insight plug-in is in the Tanzu Application Platform plug-ins group, see Install Tanzu CLI plug-ins.
Add vulnerability scan reports to the SCST - Store. You can do this either by using the tanzu insight image add command or by installing the SCST - Scan. For more information, see Add data and Supply Chain Security Tools - Scan.

Create vulnerability analyses

A vulnerability analysis contains the following data:

state: Declares the current state of an occurrence of a vulnerability, after automated or manual analysis.
justification: The rationale of why the impact analysis state was asserted.
response: A response to the vulnerability by the manufacturer, supplier, or project responsible for the affected component or service.
comment: Free form comments to provide additional details.

For more information about the supported values for each of these fields, see the Tanzu CLI Command Reference documentation.

For example, if you are interested in a vulnerability affecting a specific image in your workload, and are investigating its impact, you can add this information to the SCST - Store:

tanzu insight triage update \
  --cveid $CVEID \
  --pkg-name $PKG-NAME \
  --pkg-version $PKG-VERSION \
  --img-digest $IMG-DIGEST \
  --artifact-group-uid $ARTIFACT-GROUP-UID \
  --state in_triage

Where:

CVEID is the unique identifier of the vulnerability
PKG-NAME and PKG-VERSION are the name and version of the Application and OS package affected by the vulnerability
IMG-DIGEST is the digest of the image that contains the affected Application and OS package
ARTIFACT-GROUP-UID is the unique identifier for the workload that contains the image. If your workload was deployed with Tanzu CLI, you can find its unique identifier with the following command:
```
kubectl get workload $MY_WORKLOAD_NAME --namespace $MY_WORKLOAD_NAMESPACE --output jsonpath='{.metadata.uid}'
```

Note
If your affected package is linked to a source instead of an image, you can use --src-commit instead of --img-digest

As you continue to investigate the vulnerability, you can update your analysis with the latest findings by using the tanzu insight triage update command as many times as needed.

View existing analysis

To view all the existing analysis in SCST - Store, run:

tanzu insight triage list

The results are paginated by default. You can switch the current page or the number of results returned by providing the --page or --limit flags respectively. You can also filter the results by image or source. For more information, use the --help flag or see the Tanzu CLI Command Reference documentation.

Copy an analysis

Sometimes, you might run into scenarios where an existing analysis might be shared between multiple images, for example, when a new version of an existing image is deployed by your workload and it contains the same vulnerability as the previous version, or when you create an analysis for an image that is shared between multiple workloads.

To speed up triage in those cases, you can use the copy subcommand:

tanzu insight triage copy \
  --triage-uid-to-copy $TRIAGE-UID \
  --img-digest $TARGET-IMAGE

Where:

TRIAGE-UID is the uid of an existing analysis
TARGET-IMAGE is the digest of an image you want to copy the analysis to

The following conditions are required for this action:

If specified, the targeted image or source must contain the package affected by the vulnerability in the existing analysis.
If only an image or source is specified, they must belong to the same workload as the one in the existing analysis.
If only an artifact-group-uid is specified, it must contain the image or source associated with the existing analysis.

Note
The responsibility of assessing a vulnerability’s impact is up to the person in charge of triage. Images and sources with the same package and version might use the package differently and might not have the same analysis values.

Rebase multiple analyses

When you carry out vulnerability analysis on a workload image, you might want to carry this forward after the workload source code is updated and a new image is built and deployed. This process is called rebase, and you can run it with the following command:

tanzu insight triage rebase \
  --img-digest $TARGET-IMAGE
  --artifact-group-uid $ARTIFACT-GROUP-UID

Where:

TARGET-IMAGE is the digest of the image you want to rebase the analysis into
ARTIFACT-GROUP-UID is the unique identifier for the workload that contains the image, and where existing analysis will be searched for

This command returns a list of existing analyses that can be automatically rebased into your target image. Each analysis on the list meets all the following criteria:

The analysis exists for a vulnerability that the target image is affected by.
The analysis is linked to a previous version of an image.
There is no existing analysis for the same vulnerability and the target image, or their state is ‘in_triage’

In this context, image A is considered to be a previous version of image B when they have the same name, different digests and image A was created before image B. This will be bound on the workload’s context, using the provided --artifact-group-uid.

Known limitations

You can only rebase analyses for images, sources are not currently supported.
If you are deploying Tanzu Application Platform workloads from pre-built images, or have a custom Supply Chain that changes the name of the deployed image in between builds, you can’t use this feature and must manually copy the existing analyses, see Copy an analysis above.